I didn't give any context on what the lamps were for or what the colors should mean. But after an initial flurry of color experimentation, people mostly settled on blue, purple, and rainbow. Stoplight colors were few and far between.

I drew a few conclusions from this (extremely informal) experiment:

It's fun to play with a lamp on someone's desk.

People don't like to send signal colors to their editor's desk.

It was a fast and silly experiment, but it made me think about color. And color is interesting.

We associate color with everything.

For example, we in the BuzzFeed San Francisco have all seen a lot of stoplights in our time. We probably associate a lamp blaring red, orange, or green with particular signals. But colors also have emotional associations: red is often linked with rage, and blue with sadness or calm. And there are plenty of more nebulous connections.

And speaking of nebulous associations...

Much like color, emojis sometimes express emotion and sometimes express more abstract concepts. And as much as I kid around about emojis, there are massive committees meeting to figure out the different associations and ramifications of new potential emoji. Emojis are the bizarre resurgence of an ancient communication method. We've made specific pictographs ridiculously accessible, and we are still mapping the meaning of super weird emojis like :upside_down_smiley:.

Let's connect color and emojis.

Christine Sunu

So what happens when we take a deeply embedded and easily associated signal (color) and ask for it to be linked with a new and weird, relatively unmapped medium (emoji)?

Open Lab for Journalism, Technology, and the Arts is a workshop in BuzzFeed’s San Francisco bureau. We offer fellowships to artists and programmers and storytellers to spend a year making new work in a collaborative environment. Read more about the lab or read more from Christine.